Ask me for my new critique of institutional criticism

In his book Public Books, Henry Ivry describes the turn to infrastructure in the humanities not only as a subject of study but as a mode of literary criticism. This mode is as much about the work of doing criticism (reading, analyzing, writing, etc.) as it is about reconsidering the structures and relations that produce it. Some authors, the argument goes, “are infrastructuresing critique: building new models of critique that foreground how infrastructure is not just an object of concern, but a methodology for contemporary research.” Ivry’s best example is a “group of black women scholars in the late 1970s” who established “the academic conditions for reproducing new kinds of knowledge outside of institutional dependency” by nominating each other for literary prizes, citing each other, and adding their compatriots to syllabi. Above the fold, this article is about a perennial favorite on MetaFilter, but infrastructure is one of those expansive, mosaic, and recursive topics, so there’s a lot to be said for how infrastructure is a topic that can be approached critically.
Ivry devotes half of his essay to unpacking the questions “Why infrastructure?” and “Why now in the humanities?” The answers he proposes involve a tour d’horizon of the anthropology of infrastructure. A central idea in this field comes from Brian Larkin, who suggests that “infrastructures are matter that enables the movement of other matter.” Larkin’s decade-old observation draws on Susan Leigh Star’s work in the 1990s, which led to a theorization of infrastructure as a political terrain that has been done extensively in the years since. Many authors, including those cited in the article, have described the new forms of politics that certain infrastructures engender, including the subjects/objects involved and their various agencies. (Larkin also said that infrastructure is “things and the relations between things,” i.e., political.) This includes modernist ethical aspirations like building highways and dams in the pursuit of a better life, but infrastructure is also dissected in technical, financial, and cultural terms.

Each of these approaches can be applied to similar ends, and I think the result is generally similar to the institutional critique of the art world and its turn to social practice, but in the context of the humanities and, to some extent, the sciences. In both cases, there can be profound insights, but the results are usually descriptive. If there are challenges or changes to current infrastructures, they are usually countercultural and short-lived.

Where Ivry does not elaborate, but seems useful to me, is on the capacity of infrastructures to generate and reconfigure arrangements between more-than-human subjects. Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita describe the capacity of infrastructures to do all of what I have described above at the same time (PDF). In other words, infrastructures are not only political/social/technical/financial/cultural, but ontological, and their constant reconfiguration makes them open-ended experiments. Infrastructures are capable of all this because they are heterogeneous assemblages. Being so complex, infrastructures must choreograph the different ontologies of their components in order to be understood as infrastructures. I think the most complete example can be found in nature-based infrastructures, where multiple forms of life are involved in the choreography. The recent popularity of nature-based infrastructures pushes the descriptive boundaries and real-world applications, where there is a bidirectional relationship between life and its so-called substrate.

Ivry’s article refers to “infrastructural reading,” which might be a useful method for achieving this broader goal, though Ivry’s reading of it is downright political. (There may be some interesting allusions to James C. Scott’s concept of readability in this approach.) Whether or not you think so, enjoy reading!